How Placing Patient Records On Blockchain Can Improve Continuity of Care

When you think about your patients and your medical facility, you cannot help but feel pressure. Pressure to protect their data. And pressure to protect their health.

Unfortunately, your current medical record setup may actually be working against you, causing you more harm than good. But that’s where blockchain comes in.

That’s right. Blockchain.

While blockchain can certainly keep cryptocurrency secure, it can also help keep medical records secure. Here’s a rundown on how placing patient records on blockchain can improve continuity of care.

Let’s get started!

The Current Problem with Medical Records

The way in which patient records are currently shared and stored is far from efficient. Many roadblocks prevent data from being shared easily, and patients’ medical data are often stored by multiple health care providers.

The result?

A patient’s full medical history is fragmented, spread across several providers’ systems. This, unfortunately, makes it hard to amalgamate health data, and it also increases the chance that data will be stolen due to a data breach.

The application of blockchain to patient record management is currently in its beginning states. However, blockchain does offer some security benefits, so it will no doubt become increasingly popular for reducing data breaches and making patient health data more shareable in the years ahead.

Blockchain is essentially a chain of blocks of data that contain details about transactions. All of these transactions are encrypted so as to promote privacy.

Instead of storing data in one location, blockchain allows patient data to remain in an encrypted ledger. Then, the data are distributed across replicated databases that are synchronized. All of the blocks of data are linked, and access to the data is carefully controlled.

This type of decentralized data storage system may help to prevent the types of data breaches that companies like Equifax and Anthem experienced within the past few years.

If we start using blockchain for patient data, several medical providers would no longer have to store their own records of patient data. Instead, patients could effortlessly access all of their health data in one location, and they could simply give their doctors access to their health care information via keys.

This will improve continuity of care because all of a patient’s doctors can gain access to the same patient information and make decisions based on it.

It will also improve security, as no one could hack one data block without hacking every other block in the chain.

Simply put, using blockchain for medical records can be a win-win for you and for the patient.

How We Can Help
We are hosting our 2nd Annual Blockchain Healthcare Summit — the first blockchain health care summit that is evidence-based.

At our summit, which will occur on June 13, 2019, you will learn how to capitalize on distributed ledger and blockchain technologies.

Get in touch with us to find out more about how you can tap into the power of blockchain to keep your patients’ medical records, your patients’ health and, in turn, your reputation as a health care provider in good condition in the months and years ahead.